A tale of Austin Metro's
Discussion
Hi all I'm scott, and this is my first post here. 
I'm 19, and bought my first car when I was 18, it was a Henley blue 1989 Austin Metro 998 and I paid £400 for it. It was a total tip! But as is tradition with your first car you have love it no matter what and I did.
I kept it for two months until the rear suspension pipe burst due to the ill fitted exhaust pipe, this ended up making the whole car drag it's arse on the ground as it was so low, I ended up selling it for £275. 
Here's a couple of pics of the car:
I then went out and bought my other car, as I had paid for my insurance I wanted to get another Metro, but this time hopefully a better one.
This one is the car I still have now. It is another Henley Blue Austin Metro 1.0, I bought this in September, the same day the suspension pipe failed on the first Metro. I bought it for £375 with 12 months MOT.
It turned out to be way cleaner than I could have hoped, and drove much better than the old one ever did!
Since buying it I've carried out a few mods.
On the inside I've fitted a Pioneer head unit with uprated speakers, Rover 220 Turbo front and rear seats converted to fit with Metro seat sub-frames, a Mountney steering wheel, remote central locking, MG Metro clocks with a rev counter, and white LED dash lights.
Mechanically I overhauled the ignition with Powerspark electronic ignition, uprated HT leads, and a new ignition coil. I've also fitted EBC green stuff brake pads, and I fitted 12X5 Minilites with Yokohama A539 tyres, it handles really well now.
Some pictures:
With the old wheels, these were MK1 steel wheels with Vanden Plas chrome trims:
And here's with the Minilites:
Then I had an itch for more power!
I ended up buying a 1982 MK1 Metro 1.3L. I bought it to swap the engine into my blue one.
The engine that came out has a pretty sweet spec. It's got 1.5:1 roller tip rockers, a Kent 266 cam, a stage 3 ported/polished unleaded cylinder head with 36.5mm inlet valves and a 10.5:1 compression ratio, plus it's got a MG Metro electronic ignition, a high pressure oil pump, a lightened and balanced flywheel, and a pretty fancy K&N air filter arrangement with a alloy inlet manifold and a Maniflow LCB exhaust manifold. I've got a couple of rolling road receipts for the engine and it had 90BHP at the flywheel around 5000 miles ago.
This was how it looked after I took it out and painted it ready to be thrown into the blue 'tro:
After some cleaning and some paint:
Coming back together!
To compliment it I bought a Maniflow twin box exhaust exhaust system, and a Maniflow stage II LCB manifold, it sounds sweet and not too loud. I've been driving the car for around a month now since the swap and it's sweet as a nut. Apart from a couple of oil leaks that I'm soon going to sort (crank oil seal, driveshaft oil seals) It's been lovely. I did have it up for sale a couple of weeks ago as I was tempted to get a MK 2 Golf now the car was all finished, but I've decided to keep it and just enjoy driving it. It's quite fast now due to its low weight.
A couple of current pictures now it's on the road:
So that's the story of my Metros, hope some of you enjoyed it. :P
I'm 19, and bought my first car when I was 18, it was a Henley blue 1989 Austin Metro 998 and I paid £400 for it. It was a total tip! But as is tradition with your first car you have love it no matter what and I did.
I kept it for two months until the rear suspension pipe burst due to the ill fitted exhaust pipe, this ended up making the whole car drag it's arse on the ground as it was so low, I ended up selling it for £275. Here's a couple of pics of the car:I then went out and bought my other car, as I had paid for my insurance I wanted to get another Metro, but this time hopefully a better one.
This one is the car I still have now. It is another Henley Blue Austin Metro 1.0, I bought this in September, the same day the suspension pipe failed on the first Metro. I bought it for £375 with 12 months MOT.
It turned out to be way cleaner than I could have hoped, and drove much better than the old one ever did!
Since buying it I've carried out a few mods.
On the inside I've fitted a Pioneer head unit with uprated speakers, Rover 220 Turbo front and rear seats converted to fit with Metro seat sub-frames, a Mountney steering wheel, remote central locking, MG Metro clocks with a rev counter, and white LED dash lights.
Mechanically I overhauled the ignition with Powerspark electronic ignition, uprated HT leads, and a new ignition coil. I've also fitted EBC green stuff brake pads, and I fitted 12X5 Minilites with Yokohama A539 tyres, it handles really well now.
Some pictures:
With the old wheels, these were MK1 steel wheels with Vanden Plas chrome trims:
And here's with the Minilites:
Then I had an itch for more power!
I ended up buying a 1982 MK1 Metro 1.3L. I bought it to swap the engine into my blue one.
The engine that came out has a pretty sweet spec. It's got 1.5:1 roller tip rockers, a Kent 266 cam, a stage 3 ported/polished unleaded cylinder head with 36.5mm inlet valves and a 10.5:1 compression ratio, plus it's got a MG Metro electronic ignition, a high pressure oil pump, a lightened and balanced flywheel, and a pretty fancy K&N air filter arrangement with a alloy inlet manifold and a Maniflow LCB exhaust manifold. I've got a couple of rolling road receipts for the engine and it had 90BHP at the flywheel around 5000 miles ago.
This was how it looked after I took it out and painted it ready to be thrown into the blue 'tro:
After some cleaning and some paint:
Coming back together!
To compliment it I bought a Maniflow twin box exhaust exhaust system, and a Maniflow stage II LCB manifold, it sounds sweet and not too loud. I've been driving the car for around a month now since the swap and it's sweet as a nut. Apart from a couple of oil leaks that I'm soon going to sort (crank oil seal, driveshaft oil seals) It's been lovely. I did have it up for sale a couple of weeks ago as I was tempted to get a MK 2 Golf now the car was all finished, but I've decided to keep it and just enjoy driving it. It's quite fast now due to its low weight.
A couple of current pictures now it's on the road:
So that's the story of my Metros, hope some of you enjoyed it. :P
For some reason I really like Metros at the moment. I'd love that yellow one - grubby on the outside but with that sweet A-Series under the bonnet. When I last looked the earliest ones seemed to be worth the most (too much really), and there never seems to be a consensus on how good (or bad) they really are. How do they handle compared to a Mini?
TVR Sagaris said:
and there never seems to be a consensus on how good (or bad) they really are. How do they handle compared to a Mini?
Not comparable, in that they are so much more comfortable. The Turbo was very flat on bends, with little roll at all, but all the bad points like ball joints and knuckle joints, required as much maintenance (ie replacement).
A mate of mine worked in Development at Longbridge in the late 70's and once joked that the metro was supposed to use mini parts, but somewhere along the line they made them almost but not quite the same, so they still exhibited 1950's style wear out.
Looks very nice now with the Minilites! Amazing, with the picture of the engine with the rocker cover off it looked just like the lump going in my A35, think it may well be the same roller tip rocker arms. Bet it shifts as these Metros weigh nothing, just don't prang it or there'll be nothing left of you or the car 
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